Truth in Advertising (12 page)

Raj says something. Malcolm says, “He says what do you mean by the word
toxic
on the last page?”

I hadn't seen it, as I hadn't really been paying attention. But there, on the last page, at the bottom, in smaller type, is a paragraph with the word
toxic
. In fact, the word
toxic
appears several times in the paragraph.

Ian says, “Oh, goody. The fun part.”

Alan says, “Malcolm, thank you for pointing that out. I was coming to that.”

Jill smiles. “Good catch.”

Alan says, “Let's talk about the mechanics of the diaper for a second. What makes them work is super-absorbent polymers.”

Raj says, “SAP.”

Malcolm says, “SAP.”

Alan says, “SAP is the gel you find in disposable diapers and it's a miracle. It can absorb something like three hundred times its own weight. Chemicals, polymers, the genius of American innovation, right?”

No one so much as nods. Jill says, “Absolutely.”

Alan says, “Of course, no product is perfect. In
certain
studies, SAP has been linked to an increase in childhood asthma and a decrease in sperm count among boys.”

Stefano says, “Unfortunate.”

Alan says, “Most of you are too young to remember this, but SAP was removed from tampons in 1985 because of its link to toxic shock syndrome.”

Paulie says, “Can we mention that in the spot?”

Alan ignores him. “The industry did studies and found no connection to toxic shock in outerwear, including diapers, incontinence products, and feminine napkins, which all contain SAP.”

Ian says, “The industry study found it was safe?”

Alan says, “They hired independent researchers.”

Paulie says, “I'm sure it was completely unbiased.”

Alan says, “Am I sensing sarcasm within the ranks?”

Ian says, “Alan. Light of my life, fire of my loins. You just told us Christmas is canceled for a world-beating product that lowers sperm count. I think we're all just processing this information.”

Alan says, “Totally understood. And we're here to help.”

Paulie slips a piece of paper in front of me. It says,
Know what'd be a good name for a TV show? My Dad Is the Pope.

My cell phone rings. The screen reads
Unknown
. I'm eager to step out of the briefing, so I answer as I get up and walk out of the room.

“Fin. It's Eddie.” My brother. Shit.

“Eddie. Hey.” I'm not sure when we last spoke. Three years? More?

“I called you a few times, left messages,” he says, sounding annoyed.

“I'm sorry. Completely my fault. Work's been busy.”

“Yeah.”

I say, “So how are you?”

Eddie has no time or interest in answering. “I got a call two days ago. He's in a hospital on the Cape.” Cape Cod. Last I'd heard he was in Florida.

Eddie says, “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Apparently it's bad.”

His voice is flat, cold, distant. He's been waiting to deliver this news his whole life but it's just not coming out like he's imagined. I think of my green bike. It appears with startling force. I see it, lying on its side on the grass in the yard by the back stairs. No kickstand. It had been Eddie's and then Kevin's, and there was no mud flap fender and when it rained there was always a stain from the muddy water along the back of your shirt.

I say, “How did they find you? I mean, what made them contact you?”

“He's been in a nursing home. Gave them my name, apparently.”

How strange to think of him so close to Boston. How strange to think of him at all.

Eddie says, “Anyway. Thought you'd want to know. I talked with Maura. Left a message for Kevin.” Our sister and brother. We share a last name, the four of us. We share a history. We share this dying man. But we share almost nothing else, not, say, the names of our friends and coworkers, details of our last vacations, the funny thing that happened the other day at the dry cleaner/the gym/Starbucks. We don't call to check in, to say
hi
. Eddie knows nothing of my day-to-day life, of who I've become. I know nothing about him, very little about his children. I'm not quite sure how it came to be that way. But I do know that once it happened it was far too easy to let it continue, to drift further and further away. You change what you want to change.

But here's the thing: The way I see it, there are maybe five or six really important things that happen in your life. Big things, I mean. Five or six things that define you, that stay with you. You were teased mercilessly in third grade because of a stutter, say; you had an uncontrollable erection (hypothetically) at age fourteen on a bus and had to go five stops past your stop before it was safe to alight; you were witness to an act of violence that never leaves you. Events that act as markers along the way, that change you, that may not appear so obviously each day but that inform your actions, your outlook, your narrative. To date, for me, Eddie has been there with me for almost every one.

“Are you going?” I ask, knowing the answer.

“No.”

“Are you asking me to go?”

Silence. He was my best friend once.

He says, “Look. Okay. I can't go. I've got . . . things. The kids. I'm just saying, all right? He's in the hospital.”

“Okay, then,” I say.

“Yeah,” Eddie says.

I hang up.

I go back into the room, take my seat. Jill's still talking about the brief. I can see that people are fading, doodling, texting. I also notice that someone has defaced a small corner of the large, expensive conference table. Someone has drawn a tiny picture of a turd. He is a turd man, with eyes and arms and little legs. Steam comes off his little turd head. He leans forward, as if atop a precipice, and from his little turd fist drops smaller turds—several of them are in mid-flight—into a basket below marked
IDEAS
.

F
rank is speaking. My sense is that he's been speaking for some time now, though I don't know for how long or, for that matter, what he's talking about. It's the day before Christmas, and what says Christmas better than kissing the asses of several oil company marketing executives?

We are gathered—Frank, Dodge, Martin, myself—in the midtown offices of Petroleon, the ninth largest corporation in the world, with headquarters in either Dallas, London, or Dubai (they refuse to say which). Their New York offices occupy one of the greenest, most ecologically friendly buildings in the world, a tribute to renewable architecture and design, and a breathtaking public relations coup, high above the East River, just south of the United Nations. “‘Green' isn't simply a wonderful marketing ploy for us, Fin,” one of the marketing people had said to me while we were all shaking hands. He kept shaking my hand as we spoke. “We absolutely believe in it, as is reflected in our sizeable marketing budget. People say, ‘Hey, aren't you guys an oil company?' No. We're an
energy
company. Even though technically ninety-one percent of our profits are derived from oil.
Oil
is an exceptionally dirty word, as focus group testing both quantitatively and qualitatively proves out in spades. Energy is clean. We're the good guys. Try the Danish. They're insane.”

There seemed to be very few humans in the halls—blond wood, glass, steel, plush carpeting—except for the receptionist and two armed guards. One is escorted everywhere at Petroleon—keycards, punched numbers, heavy steel doors. A humorless woman named
Claire acted as our guide and took us to the conference room we're in now, asking that we sit anywhere, as long as it wasn't in the center of the table, north side, since that's where Mr. Cameron, Petroleon's CEO, sits.

Directly underneath the table at that seat, Claire said, is a panic button. Previous privileged guests to Petroleon, she tells us, not having had the advantage of Claire's direction, have sat in that seat and silently kneed the button. To their great surprise, approximately eighteen seconds later, an insistent knock had come at the door. The conferees did not answer correctly (a one-word password from Mr. Cameron to let the guards know he's not in a hostage situation) and six extremely serious men (three former SAS, two former Mossad, one former Navy SEAL) burst into the room, fingers on the triggers of short-barreled Heckler & Koch assault rifles. One of the conferees that day, a Stanford geologist giving a presentation on the composition of subocean mafic rock, wet himself. Claire tells this story in a quiet voice, a slim, knowing smile. “One can't be too careful these days. Certain constituencies have taken offense to the work of Petroleon. You can't please everyone, can you?” Certainly not the indigenous people of Honduras, Liberia, and northern Brazil, where Petroleon has decimated groundwater supplies, been linked to absurdly high cancer rates, spilled millions of gallons of heavy crude, and, according to human rights organizations, hired mercenaries to murder protestors. You certainly can't please everyone, Claire. Especially if you're trying to kill them.

“It's an honor and a privilege to be in this room with you today,” Frank says with the gravity of an archbishop. In the car on the way over, Martin had coached Frank on his opening remarks.

“These are serious people,” Martin had said, mostly for Frank's benefit. Frank was focused on a grilled cheese sandwich at the time. “They don't muck about. This isn't soda and it's not toothpaste. To do what they do they spend a billion dollars a month. Also, let's be very careful not to mention the spill of a few months ago.”

Martin says this because Frank has a bad habit of not being able to stop speaking when he doesn't know what he's talking about or
is lying, two things he does often. He is a nervous speaker. This is due in part to severe self-esteem issues, causing him to both love and loathe himself in alternating moments. He can't believe he has the job he does, the money, the
stuff
. He feels he deserves it and, in the same moment, feels like a fraud. It makes for interesting meetings. He pops Xanax like Tic Tacs.

Frank says, “What spill?” He has a blob of cheese on his chin.

Martin says, “Third largest oil spill in U.S. history. Destroyed eight hundred miles of Alaskan coastline. Fishing, polar bear habitats, seal, otter, sea lion. They've offered money. But these things happen in a world hungry for oil, don't they?”

Frank says, “Should I mention that?”

Martin says, “No, Frank!”

Frank's job is simply the setup. “It's the day before Christmas and all over this city agencies are closed, employees are gone, but we're here. Christ himself couldn't get us to Bethlehem to miss this opportunity to meet with you today.” He feigns a laugh. No one else so much as grins. Mostly they drop their heads out of embarrassment, pretend to make a note or check their BlackBerry.

Frank continues. “Your company is a towering monument to what is good about this country. We love you. We don't want to leave. We never want to leave.”

I catch Martin making a small head motion to the senior client, a “not-to-worry-we-will-leave-the-building-at-some-point” motion.

Frank hands it over to Martin, who deftly walks through the agency's credentials, showing a PowerPoint slide with the logos of our many internationally known brands—diapers, packaged goods, candy, fast food, soda . . . oil? Martin talks about our “remarkable growth” during the “nightmarish global recession,” but does not get around to saying exactly how we achieved that remarkable growth (we cut our fee after most of our clients demanded that we cut our fee, laid off 129 people, and imposed an across-the-board pay cut of five percent, all of which achieved remarkable growth).

A quick scan of the room suggests that someone appears to have dabbed a tiny, yet pungent speck of poo under their collective noses,
if their expressions are any indication. Though, in casually turning to my left, I notice what may be the cause of their poo expressions. Dodge is sitting next to me, asleep. Martin has seen Dodge's sleeping visage a fraction of a second before I have and now appears to be sending me a signal with his eyes, as he is widening them to an unnatural state, one that looks painful. He is sending me a signal, I am sure of it, and that signal is to wake Dodge because Martin—I know this from the agenda in front of me, in front of all of us—is about to introduce Dodge, who, after rambling about God only knows what, will then introduce me, and I will impress the ninth largest company in the world by showing them a reel of commercials about diapers and candy.

And then, with his eyes closed, Dodge says, “I was just thinking.”

It's somewhat difficult to believe he was daydreaming and not sound asleep, as he's curled his slight, boneless-breast-of-chicken body into a sideways ball in the chair.

“I often do that with my eyes closed,” he says, eyes open now, trying to find the focus, casually righting himself, as if he's just awoken from a lazy afternoon doze.

He continues, sounding oddly like Mr. Rogers. “I was just thinking that it takes courage to make mistakes, doesn't it?”

Everyone is confused now, but he has their attention, this wee, curiously dressed man. He leans forward, arms splayed out on the polished table, and looks around, the confidence of a Harvard Business School grad. This is Dodge's genius. This is why he is a rich man.

Dodge says, “I was told not to mention the spill. But I'm going to mention the spill, because to ignore it is to ignore an ugly pimple on the tip of your nose. Everyone knows it's there. And what you have is a big ugly pimple on your oily, oily nose.”

I'm excited because I can see that both Frank and Martin are terrified. I'm excited because Dodge is finally going to flame out, not be able to pull up from his bullshit nosedive. It is his Christmas bonus to me.